Don't get me wrong.....few thought we could win 50 games. No one in late decemeber thought we'd win 53-55 games which we probably will do. And certainly no one seriously thought we'd run 22 in a row. Unbelievable. But what many people are asking is what has happened to our Rockets recently. Gone is Rafers and T-mac consistent play. Gone is the ball movement we've come to see. Gone is the high scoring and dominating performances. What happened? Yao...but wait - didn't we win another 10 after Yao went down, many by even larger margin???? So how do you explain it folks? It's simple. What we have seen are a few factors. 1. the level of competition has increased dramatically as we're beginning to see playoff level defenses and teams are motivated to beat us. 2. And more importantly....the players bought into a system and we saw the results. But what has happened in the league has adjusted. Teams are forcing t-mac into jump shots and taking away his ability to get easy shots or to pass. Make him a jump shooter - the weakest part of his game. In the meantime, with no inside game and t-mac not penetrating, guys like Landry can't get going. So that's where we are. And now it's time for Adelman to make an adjustment. Problem is - there's no adjustments to make. We have no other offensive opportunities to exploit. With only Scola's inside game we simply can't create the spacing and penetrating opportunities, and we are now a jump shooting team. Unfortunately - this spells a likely first round exit unless Adelman finds a way to adjust...but unfortunately, I think coaching can only do so much. However, we have something positive to look for next year with the return of Yao and Francis, and an offseason to improve position wise as well. Still, we've had an amazing season, and I think we'll only get better. But it's not the guys fault, or even the coaches, just the reality of how good the competition is and they can figure out how to adjust to what we are doing, and with only t-mac to generate the offense and no yao to offset the double on t-mac, there's not much that can be done. Our Rockets are like Kobe's Lakers last year. Not good enough to advance without a big man.
